Ars has reviewed GNOME 3.0, and concludes: "The solid technical work that has been done under the hood really complements the new user experience features in GNOME 3.0. Despite some of the gaps in the feature set, I think that the environment and the new shell is a good starting point for building something even better. The GNOME contributors will be able to iterate on the design and move it forward in future updates."

Basically saying GNOME3 is clearly not finished, yet praising it at the same time. All and the opposite in the same paragraph.

This happens a bit everywhere these days and the writers pulling this off seems proud of it. I find it annoying at best.

Aren't they paraphrasing a basic aspect of these types of open-source projects?

Aren't they almost always a work-in-progress? So somehow next year's work-in-progress is going to be better or worse than this year's or maybe it's all just a work-in-progress, always with new features on the horizon and bugs to be squashed. It's ambiguous, and reviewers are picking up on that.